Exempli gratia;
I find myself tempted in this place to
ejaculate Psha! somewhat abruptly, and ask, 'How many in twenty millions
of Christian men and women ever reverted to the make-believe impression
of the Cross on their forehead in unconscious infancy, by the wetted tip
of the clergyman's finger as a preservative against anger and
resentment? 'The whole church of God!' Was it not the same church which,
neglecting and concealing the Scriptures of God, introduced the
adoration of the Cross, the worshipping of relics, holy water, and all
the other countless mummeries of Popery? Something might be pretended
for the material images of the Cross worn at the bosom or hung up in the
bed-chamber. These may, and doubtless often do, serve as silent
monitors; but this eye-falsehood or pretence of making a mark that is
not made, is a gratuitous superstition, that cannot be practised without
serious danger of leading the vulgar to regard it as a charm. Hooker
should have asked — Has it hitherto had this effect on Christians
generally? Is it likely to produce this effect and this principally? In
common honesty he must have answered, No! — Do I then blame the Church of
England for retaining this ceremony? By no means. I justify it as a wise
and pious condescension to the inveterate habits of a people newly
dragged, rather than drawn, out of Papistry; and as a pledge that the
founders and fathers of the Reformation in England regarded innovation
as
per se
an evil, and therefore requiring for its justification
not only a cause, but a weighty cause. They did well and piously in
deferring the removal of minor spots and stains to the time when the
good effects of the more important reforms had begun to shew themselves
in the minds and hearts of the laity. — But they do not act either wisely
or charitably who would eulogize these
maculæ
as beauty-spots and
vindicate as good what their predecessors only tolerated as the lesser
evil.
12th Aug. 1826.
Ib.
15. p. 424.
For in actions of this kind we are more to respect what the greatest
part of men is commonly prone to conceive, than what some few men's
wits may devise in construction of their own particular meanings.
Plain it is, that a false opinion of some personal divine excellency
to be in those things which either nature or art hath framed causeth
always religious adoration.
How strongly might this most judicious remark be turned against Hooker's
own mode of vindicating this ceremony!
Ib.
lxvi. 2. p. 432.
The Church had received from Christ a promise that such as have
believed in him these signs and tokens should follow them.
'To cast
out devils, to speak with tongues, to drive away serpents, to be free
from the harm which any deadly poison could work, and to cure diseases
by imposition of hands.'
Mark xvi.
The man who verily and sincerely believes the narrative in St. John's
Gospel of the feeding of five thousand persons with a few loaves and
small fishes, and of the raising of Lazarus, in the plain and literal
sense, cannot be reasonably suspected of rejecting, or doubting, any
narrative concerning Christ and his Apostles, simply as miraculous. I
trust, therefore, that no disbelief of, or prejudice against, miraculous
events and powers will be attributed to me, as the ground or cause of my
strong persuasion that the latter verses of the last chapter of St.
Mark's Gospel were an additament of a later age, for which St. Luke's
Acts of the Apostles misunderstood supplied the hints.
Ib.
lxxii. 15 & 16. p.539.
If Richard Hooker had written only these two precious paragraphs, I
should hold myself bound to thank the Father of lights and Giver of all
good gifts for his existence and the preservation of his writings.
B. viii. c. ix. 2. vol. iii. p. 537.
As there could be in natural bodies no motion of anything, unless
there were some which moveth all things, and continueth immoveable;
even so in politic societies, there must be some unpunishable, or else
no man shall suffer punishment.
It is most painful to connect the venerable, almost sacred, name of
Richard Hooker with such a specimen of puerile sophistry, scarcely
worthy of a court bishop's trencher chaplain in the slavering times of
our Scotch Solomon. It is, however, of some value, some interest at
least, as a striking example of the confusion of an idea with a
conception. Every conception has its sole reality in its being referable
to a thing or class of things, of which, or of the common characters of
which, it is a reflection. An idea is a power,
Greek: dúnamis nœra
which constitutes its own reality, and is in order of thought
necessarily antecedent to the things in which it is more or less
adequately realized, while a conception is as necessarily posterior.
Index p. 2
Vol. iii. p. 583.
The following truly admirable discourse is, I think, the concluding
sermon of a series unhappily not preserved.
Ib.
p.584.
If it were so in matters of faith, then, as all men have equal
certainty of this, so no believer should be more scrupulous and
doubtful than another. But we find the contrary. The angels and
spirits of the righteous in heaven have certainty most evident of
things spiritual: but this they have by the light of glory. That which
we see by the light of grace, though it be indeed more certain; yet it
is not to us so evidently certain, as that which sense or the light of
nature will not suffer a man to doubt of.
Hooker's meaning is right; but he falls into a sad confusion of words,
blending the thing and the relation of the mind to the thing. The fourth
moon of Jupiter is certain in itself; but evident only to the astronomer
with his telescope.
Ib.
p. 585-588.
The other, which we call the certainty of adherence, is when the heart
doth cleave and stick unto that which it doth believe. This certainty
is greater in us than the other ... (down to) the fourth
question resteth, and so an end of this point.
These paragraphs should be written in gold. O! may these precious words
be written on my heart!
- That we all need to be redeemed, and that therefore we are all in
captivity to an evil:
- That there is a Redeemer:
- That the redemption relatively to each individual captive is, if not
effected under certain conditions, yet manifestable as far as is fitting
for the soul by certain signs and consequents: — and
- That these signs are in myself; that the conditions under which the
redemption offered to all men is promised to the individual, are
fulfilled in myself;
these are the four great points of faith, in which the humble Christian
finds and feels a gradation from trembling hope to full assurance; yet
the will, the act of trust, is the same in all. Might I not almost say,
that it rather increases with the decrease of the consciously discerned
evidence? To assert that I have the same assurance of mind that I am
saved as that I need a Saviour, would be a contradiction to my own
feelings, and yet I may have an equal, that is, an equivalent assurance.
How is it possible that a sick man should have the same certainty of his
convalescence as of his sickness? Yet he may be assured of it. So again,
my faith in the skill and integrity of my physician may be complete, but
the application of it to my own case may be troubled by the sense of my
own imperfect obedience to his prescriptions. The sort of our beliefs
and assurances is necessarily modified by their different subjects. It
argues no want of saving faith on the whole, that I cannot have the same
trust in myself as I have in my God. That Christ's righteousness can
save me, — that Christ's righteousness alone can save — these are simple
positions, all the terms of which are steady and copresent to my mind.
But that I shall be so saved, — that of the many called I have been one
of the chosen, — this is no mere conclusion of mind on known or assured
premisses. I can remember no other discourse that sinks into and draws
up comfort from the depths of our being below our own distinct
consciousness, with the clearness and godly loving-kindness of this
truly evangelical God-to-be-thanked-for sermon. But how large, how
important a part of our spiritual life goes on like the circulation,
absorptions, and secretions of our bodily life, unrepresented by any
specific sensation, and yet the ground and condition of our total sense
of existence!
While I feel, acknowledge, and revere the almost measureless superiority
of the sermons of the divines, who labored in the first, and even the
first two centuries of the Reformation, from Luther to Leighton, over
the prudential morals and apologizing theology that have characterized
the unfanatical clergy since the Revolution in 1688, I cannot but regret,
especially while I am listening to a Hooker, that they withheld all
light from the truths contained in the words 'Satan', 'the Serpent', 'the
Evil Spirit', and this last used plurally.
Index p. 2
Ib.
s. 31. p. 659-661.
But we say, our salvation is by Christ alone; therefore howsoever, or
whatsoever, we add unto Christ in the matter of salvation, we
overthrow Christ. Our case were very hard, if this argument, so
universally meant as it is proposed, were sound and good. We ourselves
do not teach Christ alone, excluding our own faith, unto
justification; Christ alone, excluding our own work, unto
sanctification; Christ alone, excluding the one or the other as
unnecessary unto salvation. ... As we have received, so we teach that
besides the bare and naked work, wherein Christ, without any other
associate, finished all the parts of our redemption and purchased
salvation himself alone; for conveyance of this eminent blessing unto
us, many things are required, as, to be known and chosen of God
before the foundations of the world; in the world to be
called, justified, sanctified; after we have left the world to
be received into glory; Christ in every of these hath somewhat which
he worketh alone. &c. &c.
No where out of the Holy Scripture have I found the root and pith of
Christian faith so clearly and purely propounded as in this section.
God, whose thoughts are eternal, beholdeth the end, and in the completed
work seeth and accepteth every stage of the process. I dislike only the
word 'purchased;' — not that it is not Scriptural, but because a metaphor
well and wisely used in the enforcement and varied elucidation of a
truth, is not therefore properly employed in its exact enunciation. I
will illustrate, amplify and
divide
the word with Paul; but I
will propound it collectively with John. If in this admirable passage
aught else dare be wished otherwise, it is the division and yet
confusion of time and eternity, by giving an anteriority to the latter.
I am persuaded, that the practice of the Romish church tendeth to make
vain the doctrine of salvation by faith in Christ alone; but judging by
her most eminent divines, I can find nothing dissonant from the truth in
her express decisions on this article. Perhaps it would be safer to
say: — Christ alone saves us, working in us by the faith which includes
hope and love.
Ib.
s. 34. p. 671.
If it were not a strong deluding spirit which hath possession of their
hearts; were it possible but that they should see how plainly they do
herein gainsay the very ground of apostolic faith?... The Apostle, as
if he had foreseen how the Church of Rome would abuse the world in
time by ambiguous terms, to declare in what sense the name of grace
must be taken, when we make it the cause of our salvation, saith,
He saved us according to his mercy, &c.
In all Christian communities there have been and ever will be too many
Christians in name only; — too many in belief and notion only: but
likewise, I trust, in every acknowledged Church, Eastern or Western,
Greek, Roman, Protestant, many of those in belief, more or less
erroneous, who are Christians in faith and in spirit.
I neither do
nor can think, that any pious member of the Church of Rome did ever in
his heart attribute any merit to any work as being his work.
A
grievous error and a mischievous error there was practically in mooting
the question at all of the condignity of works and their rewards. In
short, to attribute merit to any agent but God in Christ, our faith as
Christians forbids us; and to dispute about the merit of works
abstracted from the agent, common sense ought to forbid us.
Index p. 2
Ib.
p. 698.
I said directly and plainly to all men's understanding, that it was
not indeed to be doubted, but many of the Fathers were saved; but the
means, said I, was not their ignorance, which excuseth no man with
God, but their knowledge and faith of the truth, which, it appeareth,
God vouchsafed them, by many notable monuments and records extant of
it in all ages.
certainly, if the ignorance proceeded directly or indirectly from a
defect or sinful propensity of the will; but where no such cause is
imaginable, in such cases this position of Master Travers is little less
than blasphemous to the divine goodness, and in direct contradiction to
an assertion of St. Paul's
, and to an evident consequence from our
Saviour's own words on the polygamy of the fathers.
Index p. 2
Ib.
p. 719.
The next thing discovered, is an opinion about the assurance of men's
persuasion in matters of faith. I have taught, he saith, 'That the
assurance of things which we believe by the word, is not so certain as
of that we perceive by sense.'
A useful instance to illustrate the importance of distinct, and the
mischief of equivocal or multivocal, terms. Had Hooker said that the
fundamental truths of religion, though perhaps even more certain, are
less evident than the facts of sense, there could have been no
misunderstanding. Thus the demonstrations of algebra possess equal
certainty with those of geometry, but cannot lay claim to the same
evidence. Certainty is positive, evidence relative; the former, strictly
taken, insusceptible of more or less, the latter capable of existing in
many different degrees.
Writing a year or more after the preceding note, I am sorry to say that
Hooker's reasoning on this point seems to me sophistical throughout.
That a man must see what he sees is no persuasion at all, nor bears the
remotest analogy to any judgment of the mind. The question is, whether
men have a clearer conception and a more stedfast conviction of the
objective reality to which the image moving their eye appertains, than
of the objective reality of the things and states spiritually discovered
by faith. And this Travers had a right to question wherever a saving
faith existed.
August, 1826.
Index p. 2
Ib.
p. 801.
In spirit I am with you to the world's end.
O how grateful should I be to be made intuitive of the truth intended in
the words —
In spirit I am with you!
Ib.
p. 808.
Touching the latter affection of fear, which respecteth evils to come,
as the other which we have spoken of doth present evils; first, in the
nature thereof it is plain that we are not every future evil afraid.
Perceive we not how they, whose tenderness shrinketh at the least rase
of a needle's point, do kiss the sword that pierceth their souls quite
thorow?
In this and in sundry similar passages of this venerable writer there is
Greek: h_os emoige dokei
a very plausible, but even therefore the
more dangerous, sophism; but the due detection and exposure of which
would exceed the scanty space of a marginal comment. Briefly, what does
Hooker comprehend in the term 'pain?' Whatsoever the soul finds adverse
to her well being, or incompatible with her free action? In this sense
Hooker's position is a mere truism. But if pain be applied exclusively
to the soul finding itself as life, then it is an error.
Ib.
p. 811.
Fear then in itself being mere nature cannot in itself be sin, which
sin is not nature, but therefore an accessary deprivation.
I suspect a misprint, and that it should be
depravation
. But if
not nature, then it must be a super-induced and incidental depravation
of nature. The principal, namely fear, is nature; but the sin, that is,
that it is a sinful fear, is but an accessary
The references are to Mr. Keble's edition (1836.) — Ed.
But see Mr. Keble's statement (Pref. xxix.), and the
argument founded on discoveries and collation of MSS. since the note in
the text was written. — Ed.
See Mr. Coleridge's work
On the constitution of the Church
and State according to the idea of each.
— Ed.
See E. P. I. ii. 3. p. 252. — Ed.
See the
Church and State,
in which the
ecclesia
or
Church in Christ, is distinguished from the
enclesia
, or national
Church. — Ed.
See the essays generally from the fourth to the ninth, both
inclusively, in Vol. III 3rd edition, more especially, the fifth
essay. — Ed.
Part. I. c. i. vv. 151 — 6. — Ed.
See the essay on the idea of the Prometheus of Æschylus.
Literary Remains
, Vol. II p. 323. — Ed.
'Every man is born an Aristotelian, or a Platonist. I do not think it
possible that any one born an Aristotelian can become a Platonist; and
I am sure no born Platonist can ever change into an Aristotelian. They
are the two classes of men, beside which it is next to impossible to
conceive a third. The one considers reason a quality, or attribute;
the other considers it a power. I believe that Aristotle never could
get to understand what Plato meant by an idea. ... Aristotle was, and
still is, the sovereign lord of the understanding; the faculty judging
by the senses. He was a conceptualist, and never could raise himself
into that higher state, which was natural to Plato, and has been so to
others, in which the understanding is distinctly contemplated, and, as
it were, looked down upon, from the throne of actual ideas, or living,
inborn, essential truths.'
Table Talk
, 2d Edit. p. 95. — Ed.
See the
Church and State,
c. i. — Ed.
See
post
. — Ed.
But see the language of the Council of Trent:
Si quis dixerit justitiam acceptam non conservari atque etiam
augeri coram. Deo per bona opera; sed opera ipsa fructus solummodo
et signa esse justificationis adeptæ, non autem ipsius augendæ
causam; anathema sit.
Sess
. VI.
Can
. 24.
... Si quis dixerit hominis justificati bona opera ita esse
dona Dei, ut non sint etiam bona ipsius justificati merita; aut
ipsum justificatum bonis operibus, quæ ab eo per Dei gratiam,
et Jesu Christi meritum, cujus vivum membrum est, fiunt, non vere
mereri augmentum gratiæ, vitam æternam, et ipsius vitæ æternæ, si
tamen in gratia decesserit, conscecutionem atque etiam gloriæ
augmentum, anathema sit.
Ib. Can.
32. — Ed.
Rom. ii. 12. — Ed.
Matt. xix. 8. — Ed.
Notes on Field on the Church1
Fly-leaf. — Hannah Scollock, her book, February 10, 1787.
This, Hannah Scollock! may have been the case;
Your writing therefore I will not erase.
But now this book, once yours, belongs to me,
The Morning Post's and Courier's S. T. C.; —
Elsewhere in College, knowledge, wit and scholerage
To friends and public known, as S. T. Coleridge.
Witness hereto my hand, on Ashly Green,
One thousand, twice four hundred, and fourteen
Year of our Lord — and of the month November,
The fifteenth day, if right I do remember.
March,
1819.
My Dear Derwent
,
This one volume, thoroughly understood and appropriated, will place you
in the highest ranks of doctrinal Church of England divines (of such as
now are), and in no mean rank as a true doctrinal Church historian.
Next
to this I recommend Baxter's own
Life
, edited by Sylvester, with my
marginal notes. Here, more than in any of the prelatical and Arminian
divines from Laud to the death of Charles II, you will see the strength
and beauty of the Church of England, that is, its liturgy, homilies, and
articles. By contrasting, too, its present state with that which such
excellent men as Baxter, Calamy, and the so called Presbyterian or
Puritan divines, would have made it, you will bless it as the bulwark of
toleration.
Thirdly, you must read Eichorn's
Introduction to the Old and New
Testament
, and the
Apocrypha
, and his comment on the
Apocalypse
; to all
which my notes and your own previous studies will supply whatever
antidote is wanting; — these will suffice for your Biblical learning, and
teach you to attach no more than the supportable weight to these and
such like outward evidences of our holy and spiritual religion.
So having done, you will be in point of professional knowledge such a
clergyman as will make glad the heart of your loving father,
S. T .Coleridge.
N. B
. — See Book iv Chap. 7, p. 351, both for a masterly confutation of
the Paleyo-Grotian evidences of the Gospel, and a decisive proof in what
light that system was regarded by the Church of England in its best age.
Like Grotius himself, it is half way between Popery and Socinianism.
B. i. c. 3. p. 5.
But men desired only to be like unto God in omniscience and the
general knowledge of all things which may be communicated to a
creature, as in Christ it is to his human soul.
Surely this is more than doubtful; and even the instance given is
irreconcilable with Christ's own assertion concerning the last day,
which must be understood of his human soul, by all who hold the faith
delivered from the foundation, namely, his deity. Field seems to have
excerpted this incautiously from the Schoolmen, who on this premiss
could justify the communicability of adoration, as in the case of the
saints. Omniscience, it may be proved, implies omnipotence. The fourth
of the arguments in this section, and, as closely connected with it, the
first (only somewhat differently stated) seem the strongest, or rather
the only ones. For the second is a mere anticipation of the fourth, and
all that is true in the third is involved in it.